4 ­Step Mental Practice

Every Golf instructor out there preaches visualization and if you’ve been with me for awhile, you know that you don’t actually have to “see” anything in order to work on your game in your mind. In other words, a better term than “visualize” is to “mentally practice.”

This allows the golfer to do it his way. Having said that, I keep hearing from golfers who struggle with this whole concept no matter what it’s called. They can’t seem to imagine themselves swinging correctly even if they can do it on the range or a practice swing. This video is going to help you by breaking it down into 4 steps so you can really get some mental practice benefits now to improve your swing…or any other part of your game.

4-step mental practice

In today’s video, you are going to learn another advanced technique for doing turbo-mental practice. It’s long been proven that mental practice can be just as good, and sometimes better than real practice…especially if you’re practicing bad habits.

Often, golfers tell me that they have trouble seeing or imagining themselves swinging correctly or that they can’t see anything at all.

Here’s what you do: Let’s say you swing just fine on the range and maybe even in your practice swing but when it comes to actually hitting a ball, your like a totally different person.

Well, at some point, from the address until the end of your swing, it changes…or it breaks down in some way right?

Now this is going to take a little self awareness or observation from an instructor to find that point, but let’s say you’ve figured out that your swing breaks down right here at the beginning of the downswing. Maybe you speed up or drop your shoulder or crunch up or something like that that you don’t do in your practice swing.

Finding that point is helpful but not necessary. You could just start this process anywhere near the beginning of the swing and work your way through the whole swing using these steps.

Anyway. If you are having trouble mentally practicing a full correct swing, Step 1. take your club in slow motion and get to that point where your swing breaks down. Maybe you get to the top and then you rush it down and you get all out of whack right there. Stop at that crucial point where it would go out of whack.

Feel it, see it.

Step 2. Slow motion your way through that point but don’t finish the swing. Just focus on that small area of movement.

Step 3. Now, do the same thing with your eyes closed and imagine you’re still able to look at where your body parts should be. Do this a bunch of times.

Step 4. Put the club down, close your eyes or stare at a wall or something and imagine doing it again just like step 3

The key here is to create a new habit of getting through that breakdown point and only focusing on that in your mental practice….not the whole swing. It’s much easier to do and actually more effective to break it down that way.

Once you can do step 4, do it all day, everywhere until you’ve got the move down. Fall asleep thinking it, wake up thinking it, day dream about it. This is truly my biggest secret for how I first broke 80.

I’m Craig Sigl and

your swing is good enough to go low

2 Responses

As usual Craig you provide great information for the weekend golfer. You’ve helped me to go from a high 90s player down to mid 70s. Just wish I could afford you as my full time coach – who knows where I could get to.